With a more complex color palette than the previous black (or gray) on white default themes, we will have to check contrast ratios more carefully, with a goal of 4.5:1 for body text, and 3:1 for large text, as recommended by WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. For example:

The contrast between the beige and orange is a bit low. The ratio is currently 3.2:1 with f94a0a being the orange, If we switch to CA3C08, then we can bump the ratio to 4.6:1.

I did a quick audit of contrast ratios throughout the theme using the HTML5 Code Sniffer bookmarklet at ​http://squizlabs.github.com/HTML_CodeSniffer/. Note that this checker calculates ratios to 2 decimal places, so the results look slightly different than Aaron's on the same elements -- but my 3.19 is close enough to Aaron's 3.2, and both of them miss the 4.5 mark by a good bit.

Great catch, George -- turns out that the same is true of all Header levels except H3 (which is specifically styled since it's the widget-title for all the default widgets). Adding it to the master list.

When we made the main link color darker, we knocked links in the (dark background) quote format out of compliance. 25313-quote.diff applies the same link color from 23513-footerlinks.diff to links and postmeta in the quote format.